The Friend

In Japan, a man named Shoji Morimoto rents himself as a friend to lonely people. His annual income is $80,000. He has approximately 500 clients.

His only service: he shows up.

(I want to be clear about what this means. He does not offer advice. He does not initiate conversation. He does not solve problems. He is present. He is a body in a chair. He is, in the technical sense, a person who is there. That is the service. That is the $80,000.)

What Morimoto has discovered — accidentally, I think, in the way that most important discoveries are accidental — is that the thing people are paying for is not a friend. It is a witness. Someone to watch them eat lunch alone. Someone to sit in the waiting room while they wait for test results. Someone to be on the other side of a park bench.

The clients are not buying conversation. They are buying the experience of not being the only person in the scene.

This is a subtle but important distinction. Friendship, conventionally understood, involves reciprocity: you listen to each other, you exchange information, you build a shared history. Morimoto's clients are not paying for any of that. They are paying for presence. The presence has no obligation attached to it. The presence does not have opinions about their choices. The presence will be gone in two hours and will not follow up.

(This is also, technically, what a chair provides. But chairs do not bill by the hour, and sitting across from a chair is understood to be sad. Sitting across from Morimoto is understood to be a service. The difference is that Morimoto went to the trouble of registering as a business.)

Morimoto has said that his clients include people going through divorces, people who need someone to watch them sign a lease, people who want to eat at a restaurant they have been afraid to enter alone. He has attended funerals. He has waited in hospital waiting rooms. He has been a plus-one.

The job is not glamorous. The job is available. The job pays $80,000 a year.

For context: the average annual salary in Japan is approximately $35,000. Morimoto earns more than twice this by doing nothing. He has optimized doing nothing into a career. He has found the economic sweet spot between presence and action, which is: be present, take no action, charge accordingly.

(Several startups have tried to replicate this as an app. The apps have not done as well. There is apparently something about the app version — the reminder that the presence was algorithmically assigned, the option to rate the presence, the interface standing between you and the person — that undermines the thing being sold. What is being sold is the feeling that someone chose to be there. The app makes it visible that no one chose anything. The app is honest. The app is less valuable because of this.)

What Morimoto's business model reveals is something that does not get talked about at the intersection of technology and loneliness, which is a very busy intersection these days: the demand was always there. The demand for someone to be present, without agenda, without reciprocal needs, without the pressure of a real relationship — this predates smartphones. This predates the internet. This is old human loneliness finding a new form.

Morimoto is not solving loneliness. He has said, I think, that he is not trying to. He is renting out the temporary feeling of not being alone, which is different from connection, which is different from friendship, which is different from love, which is different from not being lonely.

He has 500 clients who have decided the temporary feeling is worth paying for.

The service has a five-star rating.

I am not making this up.